Sixth Sunday of Easter
So this is what it comes down to, the Easter story, Christ’s continuing presence in our lives and their consequence for our lives: “Love one another, as I have loved you.” To love, not just for the love of Jesus in obedience to his commandment, but eventually in that manner that he loved us, as demonstrated in his ministry as well as in his death. To perceive with his eyes, think with his mind, feel with his heart, the same way for one another as he is for us. And this, it seems, for us Christians is the indispensable core of true religion, that whereby we manifest as friends of Jesus, sons and daughters begotten by God, and that whereby God comes to live in us. If we are not this way, or on the way to being this way, as John says we can never have known God, and certainly not the God revealed in Jesus.
This is in response to Jesus’ love for us, and God’s love for us manifested in Jesus. Not only in his death, though the emphasis is on his death, “God’s love for us when he sent his Son to be the sacrifice that takes our sins away”, “A man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends”. But the love which leads to the death is an extension of that already manifested in his life and ministry generally, when God sent into the world his only Son so that we could have life through Him. It’s to the death we go if we want to know how great, and how great we are to love in consequence, this is a guy who lays his life on the line for us, and the call is for us to be such people in relation to each other. But if we want to know the details of the manner in which he loved, we go to the ministry and the stories that are told about it in the gospels.
Not just parables like the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, but real life events. Like the Samaritan woman coming to the well middle of the day, this woman hungering for love and not finding it and apparently not much good at giving it either, been married more times than a film star, and now living with someone who is not her husband, coming to get water at midday because she is too ashamed to come up with the other women in the cool of the dawn. She has been looking for love all her life and not finding it, and now she finds it in a most unusual place, in this Jewish rabbi who asks her for a drink. And soon she is deep in heart to heart, and engaged in high theology about rivers of living water and the messiah and where he is to come from and where we should worship. And it is as if rivers of living water open up in her own heart. Or Zacchaeus the little tax collector the most unpopular man in town, sinner, ripper-offer, collaborator with the Roman occupation, whom Jesus asks, can I come to your place today? And in so doing transforms him and turns his life right around. But it is more general than this: people of all kinds: fishermen and housewives, the poor the sick the blind the lame, the prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners, lepers and outcasts, all kinds of people suddenly taken seriously, treated with respect, treated as the sons and daughters, and they find this very attractive and flock to him in droves. And even the Syrophoenician Woman, at the very edge of his boundary-crossing, boundary ignoring love: he speaks to her from the heart, “I was sent only to the Lost Sheep of the House of Israel; it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the housedogs”. “Yea, Lord, but even the housedogs eat from the scraps that fall from the Master’s table”. And his boundary-crossing, boundary ignoring love, is drawn across the final boundary, and he cures her sick daughter. But mostly it is a no nonsense, no fuss, no big deal type mateship friendship type love, that kind of just happens, who he is. And sometimes he specifically goes out of his way not to make a big fuss, as with the daughter of Jairus and quite generally in the Gospel of Mark.
What makes it extraordinary is that this love is unto death,
this is a guy who lays his life on the line for it, who lays down his life for
his friends and even for people who are not yet his friends, as
The point of the Christian life is to get us to the stage where we in turn come to love like this: to love one another as Jesus loved us, and loves us, and maybe even to the extent that Jesus loved us, to be someone who puts his life on the line for it.
For most of us this is the challenge of a lifetime. There are some naturals among us I think, some people who treat everyone they meet with dignity and respect like Jesus beyond boundaries, like Mother Teresa seems to have been or St Francis or Pater Damien of Molokai with the lepers: it was said of Pater Damien that even animals found him attractive, that he would go into the chicken yard and the birds would climb all over him. I think there are more people like this around than we know, though one doesn’t always know what has gone on behind where these people have got to. But most of us, it is a struggle to love beyond a certain group, and it is the challenge of a lifetime. We start off for some people trying to love them in spite of everything for the love of Jesus or the love of God in obedience to Jesus’ commandment or for the sake of being a good person ourselves even though we find it hard: this is one of the people for whom, like for me Jesus died, body broken blood shed, someone who Jesus wants as a friend, and God wants as son or daughter, God knows why, so I got to love them, like it or not, try to treat them decently, and with respect not to do them any harm etc. And sometimes we need to move into this mode of operation for the people we normally love. Patience, patience! Subbah Ey Yubb, as my mother would say, the patience of Job! It was a struggle sometimes even for Jesus after all! But as we expose ourselves more and more to God’s transforming love mediated in all kinds of ways in our lives, pick up more and more of the Spirit of Jesus, we become more and more like Jesus, or Pater Damien or Mother Teresa or those other naturals more close by, come to perceive with Jesus’ senses, actually see people this way, have the mind in us which was in Christ Jesus, feel and love with the heart of Jesus, in the same way for one another as he is for us, to love one another as Jesus has loved us.